Mark Zuckerberg emerged from the shadows on Wednesday afternoon after four days of silence.
Facebook apparently had been crafting its response to the news that a voter-profiling data consultancy called Cambridge Analytica had obtained private data of more than 50 million Facebook users back in 2014. On Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg published a Facebook post acknowledging the situation and appeared in interviews with a handful of news outlets — amid suggestions that he might be wise to resign.
Over the weekend, The New York Times and The Observer broke the news of the data breach and published interviews with former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie to explain what had occured. Wylie explained that in 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan, who had received permission to gather Facebook data for academic purposes, created a quiz app called “thisismydigitallife,” and 270,000-plus Facebook users who used the app consented to giving the app access to their own Facebook profiles, as well as their friends’.
Cambridge Analytica formed and reportedly paid $7 million for Kogan’s data, even though Kogan…
